341: Counterintuitive User Experiences

This week, we talk about counterintuitive user experiences that designers regularly design for in our day to day work. Let us know what we missed! As always, we catch up on feedback, tweets, and share our cool things of the week: a blog post explaining how to polish an interface, and a YouTube series about first-time reactions.

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Follow-up:

Samuel Bernhardt shared some more Figma file organization tips – thank you!

Tweets:

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News:

Apple accidentally leaked AirTags, hopefully coming soon!

Listener Question:

Paweł Sysiak asks: "Could you list some examples of common mistakes when creating experiences? What are some UX mistakes that are counter-intuitive and prevalent?"

Stateful icons
Two choices on leaf pages
Primary actions placed in a navigation bar, which are harder to reach

Samsung's One UI is doing an interesting job of moving actions closer to the bottom of the screen.
The HIG recommends placing destructive actions far away from a person's fingers.

People don't read full screen interstitials
The introduction of change is as important as the change itself
Typographic hierarchy overrides structural hierarchy

You will read this first

Buttons are better than gestures

Gabriel Valdivia's tweet shows a great example.

Iconography and colors aren't universal

Watch Wired's video: Airport Expert Creates the Ideal Layout for LaGuardia Airport

Data visualization colors should vary by brightness, not hue

Read: 5 tips on designing colorblind-friendly visualizations
Uncharted 4 developers explain why they added accessibility options to the game
Throwback: Red vs. Blue

Cool Things:

Brian shared Cleaning up form UI, a blog post by @nikitonsky which describes step by step how to polish an interface using grids, spacing, typographic hierarchy, and color.
Marshall shared Holden Hardman's YouTube series, My Friend Watches. In this series of video, Holden introduces a friend to new movies and captures the reactions for the internet to enjoy.

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